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Tag: Web-Interface

One of the subjects which I had written about only yesterday, is that the Computer Algebra / Numerical Tool System called ‘SageMath‘ was available in the repositories, for Debian / Stretch – which is in itself news – and that additionally, the default way to use it under Debian is through a Web-interface called ‘SageNB’. Well what I’ve now learned is that the SageMath developers no longer support SageNB, and are continuing their work with the graphical front-end called ‘Jupyter‘.

But, installing Jupyter under Debian is a bit of a chore, because unlike how it is with custom-compiles, Debian package maintainers tend to break major software down into little bits and pieces. At one point, I had Jupyter running, but with no awareness of the existence of SageMath. What finally did the trick for me today, was to install the following packages:

python-notebook

jupyter-nbextension-jupyter-js-widgets

sage-math-jupyter

Needless to say, that last package out of the three is the most important, and may even pull in enough of the other packages, to be selected by itself. It’s just that I did not know immediately, to install that last package.

So this is what SageMath 7.4 looks like, through Jupyter:

(Corrected 09/18/2018, 3h50 … )

(Updated 09/18/2018, 5h40 … )

(As of 09/16/2018, 20h10 : )

Frankly, I was a bit disappointed at first. My main disappointment seemed to be with the fact, that this GUI did not offer to typeset the Math. It does allow us to ‘download’ our Notebooks as PDF-Files, but when we do, we simply get the same, highlighted text, and graphics, only as a PDF – in code – or with whatever appearance the browser-view is already showing us. Also, the support for 3D plots is lackluster, as the plot above is non-interactive. At least with SageNB, I was able to select the ‘canvas3d’ viewer, which allowed the plot to be rotated. Also, if we use SageMath from the command-line, it defaults to using ‘JMol’ as its viewer, which is full-featured.

But as it turns out, I have discovered ‘the trick’, to getting Jupyter to typeset the users’ Math…

One of the mundane limitations which I’ve faced in past years, when installing Computer Algebra Systems etc., under Linux, that were supposed to be open-source, was that the only game in town – almost – was either ‘Maxima’ or ‘wxMaxima’, the latter of which is a fancy GUI, as well as a document exporter, for the former.

Well one fact which the rest of the computing world has known about for some time, but which I am newly finding for myself, is that software exists called ‘SageMath‘. Under Debian / Stretch, this is ‘straightforward’ to install, just by installing the meta-package from the standard repositories, named ‘sagemath’. If the reader also wants to install this, then I recommend also installing ‘sagemath-doc-en’ as well as ‘sagetex’ and ‘sagetex-doc’. Doing this will literally pull in hundreds of actual packages, so it should only be done on a strong machine, with a fast Internet connection! But once this has been done, the result will be enjoyable:

I have just clicked around a little bit, in the SageMath Notebook viewer, which is browser-based, and which I’m sure only provides a skeletal front-end to the actual software. But there is a feature which I already like: When the user wishes to Print his or her Worksheet, doing so from the browser just opens a secondary browser-window, from which we may ‘Save Page As…’ , and when we do, we discover that the HTML which gets saved, has its own, internal ‘MathJax‘ server. What this seems to suggest at first glance, is that the equations will display typeset correctly, without depending on an external CDN. Yay!

There exists a higher-quality solution to this need, known as ‘Samsung Side-Sync’. But a big problem in my own desire to use this Android app, is the fact that its client-program is only available for Mac or Windows – while I mainly tend to have Linux installed on my PCs and laptops.

The capability which the app delivers, is to turn the Android device into a type of remote, VNC Host, or Server, on which a client seeks to establish a session, in which the properties and resources of the host, are displayed on the client-computer, remotely, as if the user of the client was in fact sitting in front of the host.

This is not so strange an idea, as various types of VNC / RDP already exist, by which a remote session is created on a Windows or a Linux PC as host, such that the client – even if that client exists as an Android client – can seem to have a remote session.

Because I was intrigued by making the Android device the host for a change, and by the possibility of using a Web-interface as client, I decided to give an app a try, which is called AirDroid. After all, even Linux computers have Web-browsers which would be powerful enough to run as clients.

I installed the app on my up-to-date Google Pixel C Tablet, But was initially disappointed, in the apparent observation, that AirDroid just did not seem stable enough to trust with such an objective.